Operationalism

Operationalism is a fancy word that basically means we need to define things by what we can measure about them or how we can use them.

Imagine you want to measure the length of a toy car. You can't just say "the car is 5 inches long" because people might have different ways of measuring it, or some people might not have a ruler handy. So instead, you decide to measure the length of the car by counting how many blocks it takes up, or how many paper clips lined up end to end will reach from one end of the car to the other. By defining the length of the car in a way that can be measured with common tools or by counting, you are using operationalism.

Operationalism helps us be more precise when we're talking about things, and it makes it easier for different people to agree on what we're talking about. If we can all agree on how to measure something, then we can compare our measurements and know for sure whether two things are the same size, shape, or weight. So basically, operationalism just means being really clear about how we define things so that we can understand them better.